The Politics of Education

This is from the “Readings” section in the August 2010 issue of Harper’s, and I have been reading it over trying to decide what frightens me most about it.

The content of education is always, always, political and there will always be someone somewhere who thinks her or his perspective has been left out of what children are taught, to their detriment as individuals and to the detriment of society as a whole. Independently of that, thought, I am a big believer in trying to find as many ways as possible to include as many perspectives as possible in the classroom, not to make the point that they are all equally valid, but to make the point that the more informed we are about those perspectives, even the ones that have been shown to be invalid, the more responsible and accountable we are likely to be in our own perspectives. The proposed changes to history and social studies curriculum recorded here, made by Texas State Board of Education member Don McElroy–and if you have not read about the Texas text book controversy earlier this year, here’s a Washington Post article that gives a taste of it–are problematic on their face because they so clearly favor an overtly conservative political agenda, but three things stuck out to me in particular:

• Removing discussion of propaganda as one of the reasons that the United States entered World War I so falsifies what goes on when any nation decides to go to war–and I am obviously talking here about the government propaganda directed at that nation’s public to garner support for the war–that it transforms whatever lessons are taught in the context of this curriculum change from education into propaganda.
• The third paragraph down about “efforts by globalist organizations to usurp the U.S. Constitution transitioning from U.S. sovereignty to global governance” is frightening not only because it suggests that the U.S. has, and should have, an agenda to become, essentially, the governor of the world, but also because it is so badly written–unless I have read it wrong; and I have read it over more than a few times now–that it grammatically attributes “threats to individual freedom and liberty” not to the supposed “efforts by globalist organizations,” but to the Constitution itself.
• Curriculum guidelines that compare historical figures to fictional characters as if those fictional characters were real–and remember these are history and social studies, not literature guidelines–sound like something out of Orwell’s 1984 or some other dystopian novel. That Mr. McElroy and whoever advised him could not find an example of real life optimistic immigrants to compare with Upton Sinclair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois seems to me say more about the canyon-wide gaps in their education than these proposed changes could ever say about the ostensible liberal bias in education that they are supposed to correct.

I don’t know if these proposed changes passed, but that they should have been put forward as serious and substantive, that they should have been taken seriously at all, really scares me.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.